Every year, about sixty people\u00a0die\u00a0because of New York City\u2019s subway. Most are hit by trains, and a few slip onto the tracks while traveling in between cars. But most media coverage of the city\u2019s ancient and drastically underfunded transit system, in both the city\u2019s splashy, unscrupulous tabloids and its staid broadsheets, focuses not on its body count, but on how badly it\u00a0sucks\u00a0for commuters.<\/p>\n
Square this hierarchy of values, if you can,\u00a0with the\u00a0New York Times\u2019s\u00a0take<\/a>\u00a0on a study of marijuana-related emergency room visits in Colorado.\u00a0Published last week in the journal\u00a0Annals of Internal Medicine<\/a>, the state-funded study analyzed nearly 10,000 trips to a Denver-area hospital over a four-year period, tracked with a code for being cannabis-related.\u00a0<\/p>\n Researchers found that of these, only about 26 percent \u201cwere at least partially attributable to cannabis,\u201d which suggests that there\u2019s some data-collection problem in which 74 percent of the dataset is questionable. Of that 26 percent of relevant health crises, 238 cases, or 9.3 percent, related in some way to\u00a0edibles<\/a>.<\/p>\n 238 hospital visits over a five-year period is not exactly a public-health crisis by any reasonable metric. At the same time, Colorado authorities absolutely recognized that consumers were getting too high on super-strength edibles and imposed a 100-milligram limit on edibles, a standard since adopted by other states.\u00a0But here is where data is helpful for creating a stir.\u00a0<\/p>\n Edibles represent 6.5 percent of the medical market and 13.4 percent of the recreational market, according to official\u00a0state sales data.<\/a>\u00a0By that metric, edibles result in a roughly equivalent percentage (but still statistically insignificant when weighted by size of the overall population) of hospital visits.<\/p>\n But \u201cby kilograms of tetrahydrocannabinol,\u201d according to the study\u2019s authors, edibles represent \u201conly 0.32 percent of total cannabis sales in Colorado.\u201d Weighted in this way, edibles present a disproportionate risk \u2014 or a \u201cspecial risk,\u201d as the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0headline declared.<\/p>\n To bolster its claim, the Times quoted Andrew Monte, a physician and a professor at the University of Colorado\u2019s Denver-based School of Medicine, who pointed out that since 2014, there have been at three \u201csurprisingly violent deaths\u201d that \u201cinvolved edibles.\u201d In fact, every violent death in Colorado related to marijuana involved an edible, both Monte asserted.<\/p>\n This claim requires examination, and under examination it quickly falls apart. One of these deaths is a 2014 domestic-violence murder, in which an estranged husband shot and killed his wife after eating a cannabis edible. <\/p>\n \u201cThe edible made me do it\u201d was Richard Kirk\u2019s defense in court, where it spectacularly failed. He is now serving a 30-year prison term but continues to insist that it was the edible that made him snap \u2014 not the \u201cescalating marital conflicts and financial struggles\u201d he and his wife were experiencing before her murder, as Rocky Mountain PBS\u00a0reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n The two other cases \u2014 a college student eating an edible and leaping from a hotel balcony and a 23-year-old man who died by suicide on a ski trip with his family \u2014 are similarly bizarre statistical outliers that have not been definitively tied to cannabis. That bears mentioning, as does the fact that Kirk\u2019s wife\u2019s family told authorities that Kirk had a mean streak and was \u201ccapable of hurting\u201d his wife. And yet his situation and these others are now the\u00a0prohibition set\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0poster child for marijuana-edible induced violence.<\/p>\n Here is where the predictable \u201cedibles can be really strong and you shouldn\u2019t take too much, dummy\u201d disclaimer appears: Edibles can be really, really strong \u2014 ask NYT columnist\u00a0Maureen Dowd<\/a>, ask anybody \u2014 and you really, really shouldn\u2019t overdo it. You also shouldn\u2019t eat a handful of pills when you are prescribed two or drink a shot of liquor for every year you\u2019ve lived on the planet. Everybody knows that, which is why it doesn\u2019t make the news.\u00a0<\/p>\n Edible cannabis has absolutely presented the legalization movement with one of its thorniest questions yet. Edible cannabis misadventures are scary and an easy refutation of the legalization line, also incorrect, that cannabis is benign and poses no risk. It is mostly benign and poses a\u00a0small risk<\/a>.<\/p>\n An edible overdose can be weathered by time, without any major medical interventions necessary. The same cannot be said for alcohol, pharmaceuticals, or a subway train. But neither can this reasonable context be expected of some media coverage.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, how do you make sure not to take things too far when ingesting cannabis?<\/p>\n The post Despite Breathless Reporting, There Is No Marijuana Edibles Death Spiral<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Every year, about sixty people\u00a0die\u00a0because of New York City\u2019s subway. Most are hit by trains, and a few slip onto the tracks while traveling in between cars. But most media coverage of the city\u2019s ancient and drastically underfunded transit system, in both the city\u2019s splashy, unscrupulous tabloids and its staidContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,1628,21,111,208],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34211,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34210\/revisions\/34211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Hazy Calculations<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Despite Breathless Reporting, There Is No Marijuana Edibles Death Spiral<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"